Because we
were delayed at the Ho Chi Minh airport and had a very short stay in HCM City, population
of nine million, we weren’t able to see as much of the city as we had hoped.
There was no particular reason for the delay other than inefficiency.
After a too
long and too noisy, but good tasting local Vietnamese lunch, we took a tour of the
former Presidential Palace, now Reunification Hall. This was our first of
several visits to places we had first heard about and seen pictures of more
than forty years ago.
And this eerie feeling we had then would revisit us many,
many times during the week.
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| Reunification Hall |
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| We saw a lot of this guy! |
We then chose to go to The War Remnants Museum and
got our first dose of propaganda. Not that the Americans didn’t do the terrible
things displayed at the museum-we did. As the Lonely Planet says, “There are
few museums in the world that drive home so well the point that war is horribly
brutal and that many of its victims are civilians.” When the
museum was about to close, an announcement was made, and within seconds the
lights in the rooms were turned off, doors locked and out we went. Efficiency
is possible!
Jim and I
opted out of the group dinner and had a quiet evening at the hotel. We enjoyed it
so much that we continued that pattern for most of the week.
A remnant from Jim’s
division, The First Air Cavalry unit patch, right there in the museum
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